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A Breach on Madison Square Garden Puts Chip Cards in Question

Roswell, GA -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/01/2017 -- Earlier this month, a representative from Madison Square Garden revealed that there has in fact been an information breach that lasted almost a full year. Apparently, the victims were a number of customers who bought concessions in five of their locations. Needless to say, this has caused the media to be all over MSQ, to the point where a group of researchers has multiple suggestions for them to improve their security system. Believe it or not, one of these suggestions is to eliminate the magnetic bar on their EMV cards.

Although the company has not revealed the amount of credit and debit cards that have been affected, it is most likely in the ball park of a few thousand. Because most of the data might have been breached from the magnetic bar, it seems fairly reasonable for them to eliminate this feature on their cards to ensure their users' security.

According to a recent investigation conducted by Madison Square Garden, they discovered "a program that looked for payment card data as that data was being routed through the system for authorization." Of course, not all the cards utilized were breached. But, as we stated before, Madison Square Garden won't say the exact number.

Because EMV chip cards are slowly but steadily replacing magnetic bar cards, fraudsters are having a harder time doing their job when it comes to card-present transactions. For that reason, they are focusing all their attention towards different channels.

It's worth to mention that completely eliminating magnetic stripes on cards would be a huge inconvenience for retailers that still don't accept cards with EMV chips. Obviously, this issue is way more common with smaller retailers that prefer to stick to the old ways due to lack of resources.

Although it is always immensely difficult to find a viable and definitive solution to counterfeiting and fraud, we have to say eliminating the magnetic stripes would be of great help.

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